Ford Focus earns top spot in small car ‘fender bender’ tests

The Hyundai Elantra, Toyota Prius and Volkswagen Rabbit were the worst performers in a series of “fender bender” crash tests performed by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS).
The IIHS assessed how well the bumpers of 20 small car models would protect the vehicles from damage in low-speed collisions.
The Ford Focus was the best performer, with repairs costing less than US$600 in a full-width test (the Elantra, on the other hand, sustained damages of nearly US$5,000 in the same test), the IIHS reports.
“The Focus shows that decent bumpers don’t have to be heavy or costly,” said Joe Nolan, IIHS’s senior vice president. “Many consumers are turning to small cars for better fuel economy, but damage in our tests approached luxury-car territory. Savings at the pump could be more than offset by a single low-speed collision in one of these so-called economy cars.”
The Mazda 3 and the Nissan Sentra rounded out the top five performers in the test (the second and third models were Scions, which are not available on the Canadian market).
Bumpers have to be tall enough to engage and to stay engaged with the bumpers on other vehicles in collisions, even during emergency braking, the IIHS says.
“Otherwise the bumpers bypass each other when the vehicles collide, over-riding and under-riding so that crash energy goes right through and crumples the vehicle body.”